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We had been to Provence and had been to Normandy, but never to the City of Light. We saved up for a year, and booked two weeks in a relatively affordable hotel. (Everything in Paris is relatively affordable, there being nothing affordable in Paris.) We looked forward to being swept up by Gallic charm and the French je ne sais quoi.

Be forewarned. I am about to commit heresy here.

We took the Metro in from Charles de Gaulle. On the train, we met an Air France steward who was utterly charming and helpful. He gave us a primer on how to use the Metro. He showed us what stop to get off for our hotel and wished my wife a happy birthday - shattering, in a single meeting, the stereotype of the haughty, unfriendly Parisian. He would prove to be the rule.

We rose up out of the Metro, stepped out onto the Rue de Rivoli, and our first view of Paris was ... a carousel! Lovely. (Paris, we would find, was abloom with carousels.) Along the street were bakeries, butchers, brasseries, wine shops and a small grocery store fronted by a sidewalk vendor selling rotisserie chicken and roast potatoes swimming in chicken fat. I swooned.

Our hotel was small and funky, and our top-floor suite offered us a rooftop view of the city. Pale and low-profiled, Paris spread out toward the horizon before us. It was a good start.

It was nearing lunchtime by the time we got settled, so we went out to eat.

We found a little bistro around the corner that was highly recommended by our travel guide.

And that's when it started.

The place was charming, the waiter funny and easygoing. Between my high school French and his halting English, we navigated the menu. Our meals came.

We were ... what's the word? ... underwhelmed? A highly recommended bistro in the middle of Paris' trendiest neighbourhood, and we had a meal that a Vancouver foodie would have savaged. Overcooked, dry duck. Doughy gnocchi. The only thing that surpassed our expectations was the bill. With a modest bottle of wine, it was 105, which, at that day's exchange rate, came in at just over $160.

It would not be an anomaly. We ate out every day, often at recommended restaurants, and the food, while uniformly expensive, was uneven - some good, some OK, some just plain bad.

There were no knock-your-socks-off moments of culinary surprise, and no experimentation. Parisienne cuisine, and Paris itself, felt caught in the tried and true - an easy sop to the expectations of tourists. Meanwhile, there was the unsettling infiltration of North American fast food. Paris had fallen in love with, of all things, the hamburger.

We did the sites, of course: the incomparable Musée d'Orsay, with its unmatched collection of Impressionists; the lovely Musée de l'Orangerie, with Monet's enormous murals of water lilies; the improbable and gigantic Eiffel Tower, unexpectedly imposing in person.

At Versailles, we had our first, but by no means our last, taste of French bureaucracy. For tens of thousands of tourists, there were three ticket sellers. The lineup to get onto the grounds was an hour, followed by a 2½-hour lineup to get into the palace itself. (We gave it a pass, choosing instead to walk Versailles' enormous, oddly sterile parterre garden. We spent the first halfhour trying to find the garden's single public washroom, and the next halfhour in line waiting to use it. My wife, fed up with the always longer lineup for the women's washroom, went into the men's.) But all these were monuments to Paris' past. It was its present, and a sense of the future, that seemed lacking.

Go to New York and you are caught up by the electricity of the place. London is busy shucking off the last fusty remnants of Empire. Shanghai and Hong Kong hum.

But Paris - lovely, obscenely expensive and overburdened by tourists such as ourselves - seemed unsure of itself. It felt fatigued culturally, at a standstill - its movie theatres dominated by Hollywood blockbusters, its music industry and television full of pale North American knock-offs. English was everywhere. The fabled Champs-Elysées had become a giant mall dominated by the usual global merchandisers - the Gap, Banana Republic, Tiffany's, Zara's, a McDonald's doing standing-room-only business, the Golden Arches rising not but four blocks from the Arc de Triomphe.

That's the curse of globalism, its homogenizing effect, and the French seemed shaken by its onslaught. We had come to Paris in search of that thing that was different, the je ne sais quoi that was uniquely, confidently French. I didn't feel like we found it.

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